I’m pleased to announce our new web design services division named Creative Services by iThemes and led by our newest team member Ty Carlson.
I began my entrepreneurial journey first as a freelance web designer in WordPress before I started iThemes full-time in January 2008 (and still get random requests for custom work which I don’t do anymore).
As such we’ve endeavored to build tools and offer training to help others become web designers and build high-quality sites for their clients.
I continue to be amazed at the opportunities for good, quality web designers all over the world, but none of us should be amazed at it. (Google with over 30,000 people and almost $30 billion in revenue didn’t even exist 15 years ago!)
Dependable and able designers and developers are hot commodities right now. There is more work than able and/or available people to do it!
Through our Creative Services division, we want to serve a different and unique kind of client who doesn’t fit our iThemes “ideal” customer, but wants more custom, hands-on consulting and design services.
Often I say that iThemes is like the Home Depot of web design. You come to our store, pick out the tools and templates you want to use and you do-it-yourself. We offer a great support forum backed by knowledgable and helpful moderators, but ultimately, you build your sites yourself.
Made by Wheat will serve customers who want to pay someone else to just do it for them.
So with this introduction, I wanted to offer some details about Made by Wheat and what you can expect.
WHAT IS CREATIVE SERVICES BY ITHEMES EXACTLY?
It is a team (or company within a company) we started to offer custom, high-quality web design services using and showcasing all of our products — from iThemes Builder to BackupBuddy and everything in between.
It is led by Ty Carlson, a veteran web designer / developer from Oklahoma City.
This is our custom services division. We will work hard to keep the brands separate, except for showing off work done through it that illustrate what you can do with our products. Made by Wheat will market and find its own clients.
WHY ARE WE DOING IT?
We decided to push forward with this for a number of reasons, including:
1. To give our customers what they have been asking for — which is custom services for our products, primarily, iThemes Builder. We’ve long had a services page on iThemes and have gotten an increasingly large volume of requests, but to date have been referring to other outlets. We will continue to refer most of those services out to others, but this will give us an outlet for custom sites. And we’ve actually done client services before. Almost two years ago, we were doing all client work through WebDesign.com before we unveiled our training membership. We ultimately shut that down as it was bad timing on our part.
2. To be a showcase for our products — We want to show what’s possible with our products through our services division, in particular, iThemes Builder. You can see Ty’s work on my personal site here at CoryMiller.com, built with iThemes Builder.
3. To be a shining example of how a custom web design shop can be run — I anticipate us using the things we’re learning, almost every day, with this team through our WebDesign.com training division and other venues. As such, it will serve to be an actual R&D lab. My hope is we can share tips, tricks, ideas, trends and more to our community.
4. To give input to our dev teams on how to make our products better — having a custom shop in our company allows our dev teams from iThemes and PluginBuddy to hear from and see how the Made by Wheat team is using it, what needs to be improved, and what gaps we have in our product offering.
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There’s a little bit about Creative Services by iThemes.
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